Sightlines Introduces ROPA+, New Service to Transform How Colleges Manage Facilities Investments

GUILFORD, CT--(Marketwire - Jan 14, 2013) - Sightlines, LLC, a leader in helping academic institutions better manage their facilities and capital investment strategies, today announced the rollout of ROPA+, the next chapter in the company's service offering that helps colleges and universities transform their approach to facilities management.

ROPA+ is an evolution of Sightlines' proprietary Return-On-Physical-Assets (ROPA(SM)) planning model, which helps colleges and universities define their strategic decision making around campus planning and investments. This unique service allows members to optimize their campus investments and contribute to the mission and long-term financial health of their institutions.

The new ROPA+ offering is built on a three-step plan for academic institutions:

• Step One: Discovery -- measuring and benchmarking facilities management expenses, teaching core concepts of annual stewardship and asset reinvestment
• Step Two: Updated Discovery + Prediction to create a model for capital investments in order to meet operating targets and manage facility risks
• Step Three: Updated Discovery + Prediction + Performance to track accomplishments, assess performance versus the plan, and then rebalance capital investments as needed in order to meet facility needs

"ROPA+ is a breakthrough offering for the academic facilities management community because it allows us to move 'beyond benchmarking' and the discovery of trends about facilities expenditures," said David Kadamus, president and chief executive officer of Sightlines. "We can now move to a new era of predictive modeling, where we bridge the gap between facilities issues and capital investment considerations by helping academic institutions align facility investment plans to capital budgets. To close the loop, we can then help them assess performance against that plan and identify needed adjustments."

On average, campus facilities have a value more than four times that of a university's endowment, and are typically in the top five largest cost centers for an academic institution. In collaboration with its more than 290 institutional members, Sightlines independently gathers and validates facilities investment data, benchmarks each member against its peer institutions, and provides strategic insight for short-term and long-term capital investment decision-making.

Sightlines was founded in 2000 with the goal of providing academic facilities management professionals with the tools to optimize the management of their current assets, capital and operating investments. The company has experienced steady growth in the past decade and that growth has accelerated in recent years, enabling the company to make additional business investments and a recent corporate acquisition in order to offer a more comprehensive approach to academic facilities management. Last fall, Sightlines was named to the 2012 Inc. 5000 list, an annual report from Inc. Magazine of the fastest growing privately owned businesses in the U.S., for the fourth consecutive year.

"University leaders know that the buildings and facilities on their campuses are among their most valuable financial assets," said Kadamus. "Our goal with ROPA+ is to help them implement a multi-step process to guide capital investment policies in order to better meet their facilities management goals and to mitigate the risks for potential facility expenses. This is really the next stage in the evolution of our offering to academic institutions by bringing the concepts of financial management tools -- portfolio balance, diversification and risk management -- to the facilities management world. We are confident it will be a highly valuable business planning tool for colleges and universities of all sizes."

About Sightlines
Founded in 2000, Sightlines works with more than 290 academic institutions annually to create its ROPA(SM) (Return-on-Physical-Assets) service, which provides a holistic approach to defining capital needs and provides an independent view of campus performance, reliably benchmarked against peer institutions. Academic institutions use ROPA(SM)to defend budgets, secure additional funds, evaluate new construction, rebalance budgets, assess maintenance backlogs, determine proper staffing and service levels, and successfully present budgets to boards. For more information, please go to www.sightlines.com or email insights@sightlines.com.